Fueled by Mountain Dew and a love of technology

Month: February 2007

I picked up 65 shares of AMD yesterday. It didn’t go as low as I had hoped, but it was close enough to my target price that I decided to buy. At one point on Tuesday, it got to $15.16/share. A year ago, it was at around $47/share. Ouch.

AMD is still a good long-term investment, though, I think. Their current financial woes seem to revolve mostly around the ATI acquisition and the ongoing price-wars with Intel. What I’d really like to see is for AMD to focus less on trying to win the server market and to focus on where they arestrongest at — laptops and desktops.

Will be hard to tell until another year or so as to whether the company can make things work or not. They have a track record of working with limited capital and being able to turn it around, though, so I’m not too worried.

The hardest thing for me right now is finding some stocks to trade that I can get decent return on in the short-term. Plus, I need to find some “safe bets” for about $10k soon that I’ll be investing as part of my retirement money….

[Update: I love after-hours trading. Picked up some shares of Disney at $35.20. I’m such a dork. Haha. Actually, I loathe Disney…. but their stock was just too good to pass up. It’s going to take more initial funding to get enough shares for it to be actually worth trading later, but I’m game. Until I get my 401k pay-out, I’m just using play cash anyhow.

It’s funny… My brother questioned the fact that I have very little furniture and don’t really go out much, while he was coming home with expensive entertainment centers, game consoles, etc. Yet now that he’s making the same annual salary as me, I’m the one “playing” with a couple thousand in stocks while he didn’t even have cash to buy a jumper cable when his car battery went dead today…. Nice]

I never really understood the Bull and Bear terms used in the stock market until the other night. It just sort of clicked. You ride a bull and you run away from a bear. lol.

Anyhow, I’ve made a lot of progress on my stock app today. Been coding it since around mid-afternoon when I got bored playing WoW. I’m having a blast. It’s really easy to tell when I’m hard at work on something because I’ll have about half a dozen or so instances of Notepad open all showing as “Untitled” in my task bar. That’s typically where I toss source code that I’m working on, where I write my pseudo-code, etc. At the moment, I’m only at 4 instances of it, but that’s after I got through a lot of the framework for it.

Now I’m working on some of the nitty-gritty stuff. Josh and I are arguing a bit about whether to use datasets or arrays for the data used in calculating and then analyzing the moving averages of the stock. Personally, I think a dataset would be the most efficient in this case, but he likes doing things the hard way, I guess, because he was talking about making classes, arrays, etc. Since I’m writing this stuff for me, though, I’ll be using a dataset — thank you very much

I’m still looking around online to see if I can find the data I need. I’m not trying to make anything on my own in here unless I absolutely can’t just pull the data from another source online. For non-standard stuff, though, I’m not going to have a choice.

For the moving average, specifically, I’m looking to interpret it as data rather than visually. Actually, I’ll probably do both… But what I’ve found in almost every service, system, etc. is that the trending is shown visually, but there’s no “summary” of it in relation to the price trend. The more I’m talking it out with Josh, though, the more I’m questioning how I can do this… I’m probably going to need to move to another part of the app and revisit the trend stuff once I have more time to get a better handle on the stuff behind it.